Surrounded by alcohol and abuse, Indian youths in need of support feel the isolation of incarceration.

By Sari Horwitz

PINE RIDGE INDIAN RESERVATION, S.D. — She sits alone in a cinder-block cell, an Oglala Lakota teenager with a long braid and tattoos. For five months she has been locked up on this remote prairie reservation for drinking and disorderly conduct.

When she behaves, she can watch television. Mostly, though, she passes the time with two books — a Bible and “The Hunger Games” — and her journal, in which she records the monotony of her long days. The journal, with an eagle on the cover, also holds the names of nearly a dozen friends and relatives who have died — some from drugs, violence or suicide.

“It’s so boring in here,” the 17-year-old says before coming to a realization that would have startled her just a short while ago: “I miss school more than anything.”

For the teenager, whose name is not used because she is a juvenile, and nine other Native Americans at a facility for minors here, there is no schooling, no vocational opportunity and no counseling. There is simply detention.

Their situation is emblematic of a juvenile justice system that is fundamentally broken when it comes to Native American youths. Around the country, juveniles on reservations are left to languish in cash-strapped facilities that cannot afford to provide the kind of rehabilitative services afforded to most young offenders in the United States. Because some reservations have no juvenile detention centers, offenders often are shipped to facilities far from their homes, compounding the isolation of incarceration.

A jurisdictional legal maze in Indian country further complicates matters. Indian reservations are sovereign nations. So when juveniles commit minor crimes, their cases are usually handled by the tribes. But when they commit a serious felony, their cases are generally handled by federal prosecutors, and they can be sent to either federal prison or a federal facility.

In the federal system, there is no juvenile division, and no court judges, rehabilitation facilities or probation system for juveniles. From 1999 through 2008, as many as 60 percent of juveniles in federal custody were American Indians, according to a commission that last year recommended that tribes be given full jurisdiction over Indian children and be released from “dysfunctional federal and state controls.”

Advocates say Native American youths have essentially been forgotten.

“There is no systemic program to educate kids or provide services for them in detention centers,” said Troy Eid, the chairman of the Indian Law and Order Commission and a former U.S. attorney from Colorado. “They don’t have computer instruction. They don’t have classrooms. They have nothing, and their services are lacking because Congress hasn’t appropriated the funding. They just sit in a cell all day.”

Pine Ridge’s attorney general, Tatewin Means, the daughter of the late American Indian Movement leader Russell Means, works out of a run-down building with a broken toilet and no heat or air conditioning.

Means said there is no funding for behavioral health services for children who have been sexually or physically abused. And when, as teenagers, some get caught up in the juvenile justice system, the tribe has few resources to help them.

“For the last two years, we have applied for federal grants for public safety and child protection and were absolutely shut out,” she said.

Social media
Most people use social media without every properly studying the services’ rules
Social networking firms including Facebook and Twitter are being told to make it clearer to members how they collect and use their data.

A report by the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee says the firms’ terms and conditions are far too long and complex.

The MPs say users may not be aware of how their details can be used by websites and apps.

Any reasonable person would struggle with long privacy policies, they add.

The committee says reading such documents has been likened to “engaging with Shakespeare”.

And it says that the rules have been designed for use in US courtrooms and to protect organisations in the event of legal action rather than to convey information.

The Chairman of the Committee, Andrew Miller MP, pointed to an experiment where Facebook had manipulated users’ emotions by varying the stories they saw in their newsfeeds.

He said this “highlighted serious concerns about the extent to which ticking the ‘terms and conditions’ box can be said to constitute informed consent when it comes to the varied ways data is now being used by many websites and apps”.

T&Cs updates
The report calls on the government to set standards which organisations can sign up to, promising to explain how they use personal data in clear, concise and simple terms.

Social media
Facebook recently unveiled updated terms and conditions policies that it claims are simpler and easier to read. It says it has “listened to people who have asked us to better explain how we get and use information”.

Meanwhile Twitter has clarified its use of data in a blogpost, which explains that it collects data on the apps which users have on their phones in order to “deliver tailored content that you might be interested in”.

This includes promoted tweets from advertisers. Twitter goes on to explain how users can turn off this form of data collection.

Relationship of trust
The Science Committee’s report also says there is a problem with apps which request information which they do not obviously need, so as to provide their service.

It says companies should have a greater responsibility to explain why they need to collect information.

Facebook
Facebook was criticised for carrying out experiments on its members despite having data privacy rules
The government does not escape criticism in the report.

The Committee cites the NHS Care data programme, which was delayed after concerns about patient privacy.

This is described as an example of where the relationship of trust between data collector and customer failed to develop.

The report says the government must learn lessons and assess the impact on privacy of policies that collect, retain or process personal data.

Ello says it has a million users, with another three million waiting to join
A social network promising never to sell user data or incorporate advertising has secured multi-million dollar backing

Ello, which launched in August, has also become a Public Benefit Corporation, which prohibits its current and any future owners from breaking that promise.

The network plans to make money by introducing micro-payments for additional features.

Investors have pledged $5.5m (£3.4m).

“There are ‘freemium’ successes like Linked In and in gaming. Ello is taking a unique spin on this,” said Lee Bouyea, of Fresh Track Capital, one of the platform’s new backers.

“We are long-term investors. We have a company on our portfolio we invested in for nine years before they were successful. We look long term for a company to grow something of scale and value.”

Some experts have argued that people are not prepared to pay to use social media platforms.

“You don’t invite your friend to connect with you if it costs your friend money. Even in the world of digital music, you can pay for services but most people don’t,” James McQuivey, an analyst at tech research company Forrester, told the BBC recently.

‘Tried and true’
But Ello founder Paul Budnitz insists his business can thrive without advertising or data mining.

“Our business model is tried and true – it’s used all over the place, it just hasn’t been applied to social networks,” he said.

The development team of Ello signed the deal
Ello’s developers have agreed to make Ello a Public Benefit Corporation – which means the site cannot, for monetary gain, do the following:

1. Sell user-specific data to a third party;

2. Enter into an agreement to display paid advertising on behalf of a third party; and

3. In the event of an acquisition or asset transfer, the Company shall require any acquiring entity to adopt these requirements with respect to the operation of Ello or its assets.

“You get an iPhone and it comes with basic apps – you can call, text and so on, but everybody buys apps because they want to customise their experience.

“For a few dollars, you can customise Ello to do what you want.”

He added that the decision not to explore user data was already saving the company money.

“If you ask me what the demographic of the Ello user is I can’t tell you – I don’t know,” he said.

“Maybe anecdotally but not at a granular level.

“While Ello has grown incredibly fast, we still have 14 staff.

“We’re adding a few more people to help handle growth – but because we’re not selling ads or mining data, there’s a whole load of people we don’t need to hire.”

Patty Rhule, a Newseum employee, uses an interactive touchscreen at the HP New Media Gallery. Touchscreens are increasingly dominating the technology market.

We all know that by 2015, every American will own a touch screen refrigerator, two smart-watches, and virtual reality goggles that replace your family and friends with characters from your favorite TV shows. But in the future, we’ll be even more surrounded by helpful, distracting screens.

By 2016 your car’s windshield will be a flexible LED display that blocks out your boring commute with a grid of 25 music videos playing simultaneously. And forget Google Glass – by 2017 everyone in the world will be wearing hip, computerized contact lenses.

Because they’ll be mandatory!

With these convenient, painful surgical implants, you’ll never miss another text message, status update, or non-skippable advertisement – because you’ll still see them even if you close your eyes.Soon, you’ll be able to scroll through hundreds of vacation photos just by swiping your finger across your cornea.

By 2019, we’ll all be enjoying interactive screen sodas that cool your insides with the latest Netflix original series.

By 2020, even the money in your wallet will be made of screens. You’ll be able to put your own face on the $20 bill, in between displaying even more non-skippable advertisements.

But the future of the screen doesn’t end there. It ends ten years from now, when every human on the planet will be safely ensconced in their own full-body screen-suit.It’ll place you in a virtual environment so indistinguishable from reality that there’s no way of proving you’re not inside of one right now!

In fact, who’s to say that everything you’ve ever seen on a screen hasn’t been a simulation inside of a larger screen that’s quietly replaced our own reality.

Regardless of whether we exist or not, the future of the screen is looking bright.

Apple Pay’s release today reminds me of IBM’s commercial back in 2006. I remember watching this over and over again when I was in middle school. Everything seems to be going the same direction in today’s market with NFC and RFID technolgy. IBM awesome.

In the U.S., people born between 1980 and 2000 now outnumber baby boomers, and their numbers are still growing because of immigration. This generation is already shaping American life, and in a series of stories — largely reported by millennials themselves — NPR will explore how this new boom is transforming the country.

There are more millennials in America right now than baby boomers — more than 80 million of us.

And I’m gonna go ahead and guess that if you’re not a millennial, you kind of hate us.

We seem so lazy, so entitled. We still live with our parents. We love our selfies and we’re always talking about ourselves.

So we’re all already living in a millennial world. It’s connected. It’s open.

And it’s diverse.

“Forty-three percent of millennials are nonwhite,” says Eileen Patten, a research analyst at the Pew Research Center (and a millennial herself). “When we look at older generations — boomers and silents — less than 3 in 10 were nonwhite.”

Because millennials look different en masse than generations past, the future is going to look different too. They’ve already led the country to massive shifts in opinion on social issues over the past decade.

“They’ve led the way in terms of same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization — majorities favor both,” Patten says. “They support granting citizenship to unauthorized immigrants — about half do — compared with lower shares among the older generations.”

As a whole, millennials are progressive and accepting. And for all you’ve heard about crippling student debt, high unemployment, “failure to launch” — we’re hopeful.

“[Millennials] are optimistic about their financial futures,” Patten says.

Try Something Else

The recession hit when many millennials were at the launch point of their careers.

One of them was Ryan Koo. He got a bachelor of arts studying film in 2003, and got a job working at MTV in New York City. “I got laid off along with 700 other people on the same day at the end of 2008,” he says.

So he moved home to Durham, N.C., and tried something else.

“I started No Film School just as a personal blog,” Koo says. “My startup costs were like $600 I think.”

Today the ads pay his New York rent. He raised $125,000 on Kickstarter for his first feature film and got grants from more old-school places like the Tribeca and Sundance film festivals.

Koo is one of many millennials who feel like they can make something happen for themselves.

“Thirty-two percent say they currently earn enough to lead the kind of life they want. And 53 percent say they don’t, but they think they will in the future,” Patten says.

That includes the millions of millennials who are still in school, including Kyla Marrkand. She’s a high school senior at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C. She knows all about the tough economy and she’s realistic, but she believes it’s going to go well for her.

“Everybody doesn’t have the drive,” she says. “I have the drive.”

The New Boom

We millennials have drive. We are optimistic.

There are more than 80 million of us.

Which is why the millennials at NPR are reporting on our own generation for a series we’re calling #NewBoom.

We won’t be rehashing stereotypes. We won’t be dismissive or flip. Because if we — millennials and nonmillennials alike — are going to understand the future of the country, we need to understand this generation.

Millennials have already steered the country to a place where diplomats tweet, gay marriage is turning mainstream, and running a blog can be more financially secure than a company gig.

Facebook says it will change the way it conducts research on users of the social network Facebook said it will change the way it does research, but stopped short of apologising for a controversial experiment it conducted this year.

In June, the site was criticised for manipulating the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users without their consent.

The network said it was “unprepared” for the backlash it received.

“[We] have taken to heart the comments and criticism. It is clear now that there are things we should have done differently,” Facebook said.

In a blog, chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said the company should have “considered other non-experimental ways to do this research”.

He added: “In releasing the study, we failed to communicate clearly why and how we did it.”

The social network controlled the news feed of users over a one-week period in 2012 without their knowledge to manage which emotional expressions they were exposed to.

The experiment was part of a study by Facebook and two US universities. The social network said at the time it was to gauge whether “exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviours”.

However, the company was widely criticised for manipulating material from people’s personal lives in order to play with user emotions or make them sad.

In response on Thursday, Facebook said that it was introducing new rules for conducting research on users with clearer guidelines, better training for researchers and a stricter review process.

But, it did not state whether or not it would notify users – or seek their consent – before starting a study.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in London, which supports data privacy for individuals, said Facebook’s comments were “a step in the right direction”, but it hoped to hear more about how the social network intends to improve transparency.

“Organisations who want to process people’s personal information without explicitly asking for their permission, for instance to carry out research, always need to proceed with caution,” an ICO spokesman said.

Should Facebook apologise?
IDC research analyst Jan van Vonno said it was Facebook’s responsibility to notify users of any studies they were partaking in.

“They’re going to continue that research and what they should do is make users aware of what they’re doing and that’s not really what they’re doing right now,” Mr van Vonno said.

An apology would be a sign of regret and they obviously don’t regret any of their actions because they think it’s for the benefit of their own platform.”

It was still important for Facebook to study consumer behaviour so it could maximize the impact advertisers had on the platform, which remains a huge source of revenue for the company, Mr van Vonno added.

The company’s mobile advertising revenue jumped 151% in the second quarter of this year from 2013 and accounted for more than 60% of its overall ad revenue.

Just this week, Facebook relaunched Atlas, an advertising platform it bought from Microsoft last year, to improve the effectiveness of its ads.